The Summer That Melted Everything(20)

When I got home, I used Grand’s old pocketknife to carve May 1984 into the sill.

If I was going to travel back and see my family, I had some cleaning up to do. I went inside the trailer and slipped out of the pajama pants I’d been wearing for the past few days, along with the T-shirt stained from canned spaghetti. I brushed my teeth, showered, and trimmed my hair and beard. Hell, I even bothered with deodorant. I figured time travel would be sweaty.

While I was putting on my tennis shoes, laced but not tied with Grand’s old shoelaces, I heard the shattering from outside. When I got out there, I saw the neighbor boy standing by shards of glass on the ground. He had a baseball in his hand. The one he throws to his dog.

“I didn’t mean to break your winda.” He hid his eyes under his ball cap. “I’m awful sorry, Mr. Bliss.”

The ball had shattered the top pane. It was my foot and tennis shoe that shattered the bottom one. The anger came, and a kick was the least I could do.

Over two years have gone by, and the boy still apologizes every time he sees me. I know it wasn’t a time machine. And yet, when I later crawled through the gaping hole of the gone window, there was a brief moment in crossing the sill I almost believed I would come out the other side to a neon light and in that I could save everything.

I had yet to know what having Sal in our lives would mean, so that first night me and him spent together in my room, I was excited to have him, though I was hot as hell as I kicked the blankets off to the floor and fell back, sweating on the sheets.

Sal was lying in the large window bed, lined with cushions and pillows, where I would sleep myself during past summers when it was especially hot because I could press my face against the cold glass of the pane. I told Sal he could do the same, but he seemed at peace with the heat, lying with his blanket up to his chin and choosing a pair of my pajamas that were long sleeved. Mom had tossed his overalls in the washer after dinner, not saying anything about their stale urine smell. She told me to share my clothes with him. It would be a while before I saw him in those overalls again.

“This heat is humongous.” I kicked the air. “How we gonna sleep?”

I reached over to my bedside table and turned the fan on high, directing it so it’d blow on my face as I lay there with my arms folded behind my head, staring up at the ceiling, which was painted as the jungle top canopy of the Amazon rainforest.

My bedroom was Brazil, and in it an anaconda coiled around a branch, scarlet macaws were painted in flight on the walls, and leaf frogs were carved on my bedposts. Mom had made her Brazil more Amazon than anything else, though there was a little Rio de Janeiro on my double closet doors that when closed formed two halves of Christ the Redeemer.

“Fielding?” Sal spoke over the hum of the fan.

“Yeah?”

“Do you like Mr. Elohim?”

“You know what a steeplejack is? It’s where you fell chimneys and build steeples, do things like that. It’s all roof work, is what it is. And he’s teachin’ me the art. He’s a nice guy. Hey, Sal? I’ve been wonderin’. I mean, if you’re the devil, you’ve met God. What’s He look like?”

“What do you think He looks like?”

“Like a cotton swab, thin and white with too much hair on His head and too much hair on His feet. Wouldn’t that be funny? A cotton swab? Kind of makes ya think twice ’bout stickin’ a Q-tip up your nose, don’t it? Though, thinkin’ ’bout it now, maybe if we left a swab in our ear, we’d start behavin’ a little differently. Havin’ God inside our ear just might make us all, I don’t know, a little … more.”

“Also make you a little more deaf with only one ear whose hearing is not sacrificed by a plug of cotton.” He leaned up on his elbow as he asked me to tell him about a day. A day I felt loved.

I turned in the heat, thinking, but not thinking long.

“January seventh of this year. It was my thirteenth birthday, but that didn’t stop the sore throat or the coughin’. I had a forehead of lava. I had to stay in bed. Suck back that horrible cough syrup.”

I did my best hacking cough, feigning to fall out of bed until he laughed.

I stayed sitting on the floor, up against the bed, as I told him how Mom came in with a bowl of chicken noodle soup.

“She didn’t give it to me. She sat it right here on the floor. Then she went out and Dad came in with a bowl. He did the same damn thing she did and left without a word. When Grand come in, I asked what the hell was goin’ on but he didn’t say a thing, just sat his bowl down beside Mom’s and Dad’s.

“This was how it went, them bringin’ in bowl after bowl of chicken noodle until there were thirteen. Dad laid saltines so they floated on top of the soup and so Mom could stand a birthday candle up on each cracker. It was Grand who lit the wicks.

“Mom said it was the birthday cake for boys who are sick. ‘So get out of bed and get down here with us to make a wish quick,’ Dad said, ‘before the candles sink.’

“You know what I wished for, Sal?”

“What?”

“To be sick for every birthday. That day, I felt loved.”

He looked down at his chest as he said, “Then you already know.”

“Already know what?”

“What God looks like.”

He pushed his blanket off to the side and stood to kneel by the window bed, his elbows up on the cushions, his palms together. I climbed back up into bed and switched the fan to low so I could hear him. I laid back and closed my eyes.